After Breast Cancer at 27 — Celebrating Life, Freedom and Friendship

This spring I went to see 12 Years A Slave with my housemates. The film is a poignant account of Solomon Northup, a free black man from the North who was kidnapped and sold as a slave in the deep South. He spent 12 years in captivity, during which he was whipped, beaten, starved, and nearly lynched. Finally, he befriended a man from Canada who agreed to deliver a letter up North begging for help. In the end, he was rescued and reunited with his family.

After the film, my housemates and I went home and started discussing the movie over steaming mugs of chamomile tea. They talked about the phenomenal acting, how difficult it was to watch the scenes in which the slaves were horribly abused, and how relieved they felt at the end when the injustice was righted, and the man who had spent more than a decade as a slave was finally freed.

I didn’t say anything for a while — partly because I was still stunned by how poignant the film was — and partly because I was lost in memories of my own nightmarish experience battling breast cancer when I was 27 years old.

A Grueling Treatment Journey

A few weeks after my diagnosis I had a bilateral mastectomy. Then, a year later, the cancer that my oncologist said could never recur (because they’d “gotten all of it” during surgery) came back with a vengeance. I had more surgery, followed by chemotherapy, during which the cancer came back yet again. Within a few days a lump near my right mastectomy scar went from pea-sized to grape-sized. I had more surgery followed by radiation and then more chemo.

I likened my breast cancer treatments to boxing. Every time I went back for another round of infusions, it was like getting back into the ring with a fighter who was about to beat me within an inch of my life. And then, two weeks later, I’d go back and do it again. Each round was harder. Each round brought me closer to death, and I kept praying that the cancer cells would die before I did.

I lost my hair, spent hours lying on the bathroom floor vomiting, emptied drains that were filled with fluid seeping out of my surgical incisions, and developed dark circles under my eyes and bruises over my hands and arms. And then, after surviving seven months of treatments, I was hospitalized with pneumonia that nearly killed me.

When I looked back on my experience, I realized what a miracle it was that I’d survived, and how precious my life was. I had a new enthusiasm to savor life and have as many new experiences as I could. I felt like Solomon Northup; finally freed from an unjust, unfair, painful experience that had nearly cost me my life.

A Rough Adjustment After Cancer

I didn’t realize it at the time, but during my course of treatment, I got used to people treating me differently because I was a cancer patient. I got out of a ticket because the police officer who pulled me over for running a red light saw that I was bald. When I told him I was a breast cancer patient, he handed back my license and registration and said, “Feel better soon. I understand they have really good treatment for that kind of cancer now.”

The pharmacists filled my prescriptions instantly because they saw I was too weak to stand in a long line.

My coworkers at the urgent care center where I worked part-time during chemo picked up extra shifts and let me take longer breaks when I was fatigued.

Eventually, my hair grew back and the bruises disappeared as my body healed. But I continued to see my survivorship as a merit badge that I used to give myself bonus points in society and in relationships.

I hadn’t realized the transition back to my old life was going to be difficult as well. “Why didn’t my friend invite me to that party? I went through hell to survive cancer and they don’t even care that I’m alive.”

And, “Why won’t that person return my phone calls? I went through the torture of chemo and radiation to spare them the pain of losing me — and now it doesn’t seem to matter.”

Life was all about me and how I deserved to be treated.

Alive, Happy, and Free

As we sat at the dining room table, I suddenly realized what had been bothering me since we left the theater.

At the end of the movie, I’d been so relieved that the main character had regained his freedom after being wrongly enslaved. But I’d been totally blind to the fact that all of the slaves in the movie — not just the one who was born in the North — were wrongly enslaved. And at the end of the movie, all of them should have been set free.

I realized that I’d been looking at my own life the way I’d looked at Solomon in the movie. I’d thought that I alone deserved to be celebrated and appreciated and savored because I’d survived a life-threatening disease, and my time on this planet was clearly finite.

And now, as I took a sip of my tea, it dawned on me that just as all of the other slaves in the movie should have been freed, all of my friends and colleagues and family members deserved to be celebrated and savored the same way I wanted to be.

Because everyone — not just me — has the right to be here. Everyone matters and everyone deserves to be savored. Life is precious, and every last one of us deserves to be alive, happy, and free.

Sarah Thebarge is a breast cancer survivor who recently moved from the East Coast to Portland, Oregon. After her move she met a family of Somali refugees who inspired her to write The Invisible Girls, a narrative on the virtues and healing qualities of kindness and love and how this unexpected love saved her life.